The Compleat Meadmaker : Home Production of Honey Wine From Your First Batch to Award-winning Fruit and Herb Variations

I got this book for my boyfriend who’s recently gotten into mead. It has a lot of great information! He really enjoyed reading it. If someone you know is getting into making/drinking mead I recommend this book plus it was affordable

I found this to be a thoughtful and well thought-out book which gives a wealth of information on mead making and each step in the process. Included are details on selecting and preparing yeast, beekeeping, fermentation vessels, and on and on.This is a book for someone that either wants to get a good grasp of the subject before doing a deep dive, or someone else who has dabbled in mead making for a couple of years, and would now like to understand what the heck they are doing (like me!).This is one of the few books I've found where sulfites are not used, and I find that to be a refreshing change. We don't need to ingest more chemicals, which are basically added to everything we eat. By using natural honey and organic ingredients (and good sanitation practices), we can actually make, by ourselves, delicious and wholesome beverages that would be difficult to purchase. The other book I've found that doesn't just pour on the sulfites at every opportunity is "Make Mead Like A Viking" by Jereme Zimmerman.Another reviewer complained about the "meandering" content of this book and the lack of recipes. I have many books on mead, and this is basically the only one where the author has years of experience backing up his theories and is understandable; this is more of an encyclopedia/collection of essays. As far as the recipes go, no, there are not that many in this book, but that's not why I bought it. I have other books(such as "Big Book of Mead Recipes" by Robert Ratliff) which has a small initial section on the background of mead, how to make mead, followed by the remainder of the book (with 60+ recipes). Also, you can find a ton of recipes all over the internet, but I have not found many (if any) sites with all the background this author provides.

This book is great for beginning mead makers. It has great cleaning and prep procedures, list of items needed to start brewing and a descriptive list of different varieties of yeast and what they help a brewer achieve.

I successfully made some good mead from the info in the book I am pleased with the purchase 😀

This book is a large snap shot of how to make honey wine (mead). (Mead was the original party drink of the Vikings and Anglo Saxons while beer was basically used like water with just barely enough alcohol in it to make the water safe to drink.) This book covers just about everything and the authors well-rounded education shines through in every well-spoken and educational chapter.This is the "Betty Crocker Cookbook" of mead making... No it doesn't have tons and tons of recipes but it does have a fair number of them and tons of ideas to create your own recipes. The book covers everything from how much honey and of what kind to use, spices, fruits, sanitation and a good history of mead and chapters on honey and a bit of general Chemistry.I have found the "No Heat" method of mead making (as explained in the book) to be simple and produce wonderful results.My own notes in addition to the book are as follows. Although the book walks you through the mead making process in great detail the one error is the book doesn't tell you how to make your mead taste like mead in the chapters that explain how to START making mead. The process as the book describes converts almost all the honey to alcohol but leave few sugars to even taste like mead. The actual answer to this problem can be found in the index under sweetening but that's in a different section.The short version is convert the honey to alcohol, get fermentation to finish and then add more honey or whatever juice to sweeten it and get the flavor to suit your taste... the books instructions are more complete than mine but keep in mind you will have to look up that section it is not in the section for beginners.Lastly there is an orange red airtight cover for glass carboys that has two holes, the central hole is obviously for a racking cane to drain liquid but there are no instructions for what the other hole is for... The other hole is to blow into in order to create air pressure that starts the racking process (siphoning).This doesnt seem to be covered anywere even though theres no way for a novice to know it...The book is great overall and well worth the price.

I found it informative. Very much so. In fact, I’ve started a second reading of the production portions and learned a few things.

Warning! Units are not converted correctly into Kg (for now I have spotted this for one recepie)I have not finished the book yet, however I have tried making a mead from it. I followed the recipe for a dry mead in metric units only to find out that the conversion was done wrong! I would be missing 50% of the honey compared to Lbs. I was fortunate enough to spot the error in time.

A true meas makers Bible. I have made mead on and off for a while, but this book took my product to a whole new level.

Ótimo livro pra quem está começando e pra quem já produz hidromel. Recomendo a todos que se interessam pela arte!

C'était un cadeau. Très bien, a fait l'effet attendu. La personne à qui c'était adressé aurait voulu des images en couleur (plus sympa à la lecture) et surtout des recettes un tout petit peu plus élaborées. Sinon, bien écrit, instructif, sympa.